In May 2007, we at Buck Naked Politics did a blog post entitled The FDA's Latest Pharma-Friendly Sins. It addressed the FDA's highly questionable actions regarding the drugs Avandia, Vioxx, Ketek, and Viagra.

The FDA approved Ketek for public sale despite allegedly knowing that clinical-study results were fraudulent. Despite studies linking Vioxx to heart attacks, the FDA waited two years before requiring a stronger warning label.

Then there's the wildly popular Viagra, which was linked to a strange form of blindness: the FDA waited a whole year to require a stronger warning label.

Then there was our blog post in November 2008, which cited a Washington Post article stating that the FDA had learned about traces of melamine and cyanuric acid ( toxic chemicals) in baby food, yet the FDA inexplicably delayed informing the baby-feeding public about it.

I'm glad that after three-plus years, major media is again spotlighting the FDA's questionable reliability. The health and safety of us consumer-taxpayers is, after all, in the FDA's hands.

March 22, 2010

by Bill Kavanagh: The House of Representatives finally passed the Senate's Christmas Eve version of Healthcare Reform, 219-212. This time, the legislation will go to the President and the Senate will take up a package of changes negotiated between the House and Senate. No doubt after some promised Republican Senatorial-haggling-over-parliamentary-procedure-to-come, the legislation will be signed into law. Healthcare reform, after a century of debate, will be enacted.

The floor debate in the House last night followed the tone of the argument in the country at large. On the Democratic side, there was a general pride in reaching out, finally, to the millions of Americans left uncovered by the current health system. There were members recalling civil rights struggles of the past to include all Americans in the franchise of voting and connecting health care as a right for all to stand alongside other basic freedoms we hold dear. On the Republican side, there were many exhortations about the end of liberty; members warned of losing a battle against tyranny and decried totalitarian tactics.

March 21, 2010

by Bill Kavanagh: It's likely that today will finally be the decisive vote on healthcare reform. Over thirty million Americans currently lack health coverage and a good many more are losing insurance along with their jobs. Beyond this, lots of people who pay for health coverage find their insurance won't compensate them when they need it most, either through rescission or because their illnesses are categorized as pre-existing conditions. The reform bill will address these conditions.

While healthcare reform could have done more to lower costs and provide an affordable public option, the moderate provisions that remain in the bill are still intensely controversial. The resistance to reform has engendered a backlash on the right that has taken to the streets. Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, two students at Wright State University, produced this terrific coverage of the last Tea Party gathering against healthcare reform in Washington this past week. It's worth a few minutes to check out the sort of sloganeering that's passed for argument in opposition to any serious reform of the system.

March 19, 2010

by Bill Kavanagh: Paul Krugman sums up the situation on health care reform nicely in his column today. It's decision-time. A few months back, we almost had an imperfect, but enormously significant reform which had passed both houses of Congress. Now, we might just get almost the same package passed, finally. It's up to a few members of Congress to step up.

The alternative, as Krugman points out, is more of the same bone-crunching cruelty that is health insurance today in America. People get thrown off the rolls when they become ill, are undercovered or not covered at all when they are well (or at least think they are), and are paying premiums without knowing whether they'll be honored when it counts.

This weekend should finally tell whether the United States joins the ranks of every other developed nation in providing for reasonably universal coverage, whether imperfectly or not.

One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years — possibly a decade or more.

February 24, 2010

by Bill Kavanagh: North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller has proposed an interesting solution to the seemingly intractable mortgage crisis affecting a vast number of American homeowners. Rather than creating a new program to deal with mortgages currently in foreclosure or underwater, Miller suggests reviving a Depression-era entity, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC).

HOLC was originally created in 1933 by the Roosevelt Administration. It's mission was to buy up distressed mortgages from the banks and then restructure them in negotiations with homeowners. HOLC eventually turned a slight profit, according to Miller, by the time its last mortgages were paid off in 1951, but in the first years of its existence, the agency was credited with averting a threatened collapse of the 1930's real estate market and with keeping homeowners in their houses— thereby avoiding mass evictions and suffering across the country.

Current programs, like the Obama Administration's HAMP program, are not doing the job of stabilizing real estate markets and helping homeowners to make loan payments workable on salvageable mortgages. HOLC, on the other hand, has a record of being able to intervene to make terms with homeowners, whether by reducing the principle of a loan in an underwater market, renting a home back to the family living in it on a long-term basis, or devising a payment restructuring as needed.

If the program were revived, homeowners would apply to HOLC, which could pick workable situations to become involved in. The banks would then relinquish the mortgage to HOLC in exchange for a percentage of the full value of it (through eminent domain), thereby restoring some sense of reality to the balance sheets of mortgage holders. Then, negotiations between the homeowner and the agency would be agreed upon. The restructured mortgages would be signed by HOLC and the homeowner, replacing the old mortgage with one that would be more workable and be serviced by HOLC.

I'm not an expert in mortgages, but the outline of the proposal has the appealing aspect of a history of effectiveness, unlike the programs not currently working. I'd like to hear readers' thoughts on it.

Here's a link to an article in the New Republic by Congressman Miller about his proposal.

February 22, 2010

"President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system, White House officials said Sunday.

The president’s legislation aims to bridge differences between the bills adopted by the House and Senate late last year, and to frame his debate with Republicans over health policy at a televised meeting on Thursday.

By focusing on the effort to tighten regulation of insurance costs, a new element not included in either the House or Senate bills, Mr. Obama is seizing on outrage over recent premium increases of up to 39 percent announced by Anthem Blue Cross of California and moving to portray the Democrats’ health overhaul as a way to protect Americans from profiteering insurers.

"Congressional Republicans have long denounced the Democrats’ legislation as a “government takeover” of health care. And while they are likely to resist any expansion of federal authority over existing state regulators, they will face a tough balancing act at the meeting with the president to avoid appearing as if they are willing to allow steep premium increases like those by Anthem."

First, insurance-friendly Republicans will have no trouble stir ring up gullible Tea-baggers or 20-percenters against Obama's purported proposal. Said elite Republicans will do what they always do: cloud the issue by speciously squawking about "freedom" -- probably something about how if the federal government can cap insurance-company rate hikes, than government can limit how much money ordinary folks can make.

Second, I have to wonder if this new proposal is anything more than mere posturing to get credit for trying.

January 29, 2010

by Bill Kavanagh: There are few politicians who could have inspired the sort of hope that Barack Obama did coming into office, arriving in the wake of a near collapse of the American financial system a year ago. His inaugural address raised the nation's expectations. We hoped, we looked for change, we thought perhaps we'd crossed some significant barriers in the country's history. Mostly, we looked for leadership in a time of great anxiety.

Then came a search for consensus. For reasons that have more to do with Obama's nature than with empirical evidence, the new President looked for bipartisanship in addressing the nation's dire financial straits. He took a massive stimulus bill that most economists said would be the minimum necessary to get the country moving again and split it down the middle. Obama designated slightly more than half towards job creation, largely in infrastructure; the rest he saved for tax cuts, hoping the huge giveaway might bring Republicans and conservatives into the big stimulus tent he was creating. It didn't.

Instead, Republicans voted, to the last, against the stimulus plan and lambasted the President as a socialist. They sat on their hands and dared President Obama to pass his recovery plans without them. So, without pulling the $400 billion tax cut, he did. Without offering any plan of their own, the Republican Party had succeeded in paring off almost half of the stimulus funding towards tax relief. Obama had reached across the aisle and had been rejected, even while still siphoning off a huge percentage of the job creating effect of the stimulus bill.

January 13, 2010

Many of us have noticed that health-care reform is not going the way that so many politicians had promised it would. Firedoglake tells us:

"For
almost the entirety of the health care debate, the Obama Administration
has relied on economist Jonathan Gruber to make the public case for its
idea of reform - even the most unpopular parts. But as Firedoglake
revealed on Friday, the Obama Administration has failed to disclose that it paid the same economist more than $780,000.

"This is a huge ethical violation that undermines the entirety of health care reform."

December 24, 2009

by Deb Cupples | The Washington Post's Ezra Klein reports that President Obama recently claimed (and quite publicly) that Obama had not campaigned on the public option as part of his health-care reform plans. I remember it differently.

So does Mr. Klein, who basically says that Obama certainly did campaign on the public option. Klein also links to a pdf that serves as evidence to support Klein's claim.

As I remember it (and my memory may be a bit rickety), back in December 2007, Mr. Obama was not leaning toward a public option: instead, he was talking about what amounted to major subsidies for insurance companies -- which is precisely what we may be getting.

Later, as Hillary Clinton's and John Edward's health-care plans gained public support, Mr. Obama started editing his plan so that it looked a bit more like Hillary's and John's. Eventually, Mr. Obama certainly did seem to support a public option.

December 23, 2009

by Deb Cupples | As a former small-business person, I learned at least one thing: money comes in and money goes out. One way to reduce the amount of money going out is to cut out hyper-expensive, non-essential "middle men."

Most people understand this simple concept. Keep that in mind as you read the following paragraphs from an editorial by Rep. Louise Slaughter about the Senate's health care "reform" bill:

December 19, 2009

by Bill Kavanagh: Like many of you, I'm sick to death of the slow-motion evisceration of the healthcare 'reform' bill winding its way through the Senate. As we inch toward the decade's end, it seems that each day brings a new Senator out of the woodwork to take his or her rightful fifteen minutes of infamy. As each dim Senatorial light insists on stripping out another element of reform, in order either to please a lobbyist or to insure against anyone who might later claim they were a progressive for voting "Yes," I have to wonder whether what's left in this legislation is worth fighting for.

But there is a wealth of experience out there, starting with the missed health insurance opportunity offered during the Nixon years, to remind us that passing on significant reform in order to drive home our revulsion at the way Washington works will delay any healthcare progress, however slight, for at least another presidential administration. That's at least four more years of millions of uninsured Americans staying outside the system, getting sicker and dying faster.

December 09, 2009

"The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid,
said Tuesday night that he and a group of 10 Democratic senators had
reached “a broad agreement” to resolve a dispute over a proposed
government-run health insurance plan, which has posed the biggest
obstacle to passage of sweeping health care legislation....

"Under the agreement, people ages 55 to 64 could “buy in” to Medicare.
And a federal agency, the Office of Personnel Management, would
negotiate with insurance companies to offer national health benefit
plans, similar to those offered to federal employees, including members
of Congress."

If one overlooks the millions of people who are younger than 55 and lack adequate health-care coverage, this "compromise" certainly seems to be a win-win.

First, our elected officials would be able to grab headlines and trumpet on the campaign trail about having achieved something in terms of health-care reform.

November 30, 2009

by Bill Kavanagh:Today, with our spirit beaten down by two long wars, an economic collapse, and a seemingly paralyzed political process; we wait for the President’s speech on Afghanistan. We’ve become restless and fearful now, still waiting, but less hopeful for the big changes we thought would be coming after we threw off the chains of our former right wing leaders. Many of us are out of work; many are underwater in our homes.

Despite the trepidation we feel about the future, there are reasons to hope that yes, we can, in fact, make a better America and a better world for our children. The first one is remembering that we did elect someone because he inspired hope. Whether or not he lives up to our high expectations, Barack Obama is in the White House because he embraced hope and change. His campaign succeeded largely on the premise that this democratic experiment in the United States still had the potential to be reinvigorated by our participation in it. Across racial, age and economic boundaries, Americans responded to that premise, with the belief that yes, we could make a more progressive and vital America.

November 15, 2009

by Bill Kavanagh: Healthcare reform, climate change legislation, education reform, even changes in war strategy will all fall short of creating a lasting political program if Americans don’t have jobs. We have a crippling level of under/unemployment, which many believe actually tops 20% today (higher than the 17+ percent reported by the feds), even while the government tells us the recession is now over. Still more Americans fear losing their jobs, or struggle with reduced pay and reduced expectations. This reality is the primary area the Obama Administration must grapple with— and soon.

Next month, the White House will convene a Jobs Summit, bringing together economists, academics, labor leaders, businesspeople, and non-profit groups to discuss putting Americans back to work. While the date of the summit has yet to be announced, a bigger unknown is whether the President will put the government’s money and energy squarely behind the effort; whether he realizes how basic creating jobs is to his success in dealing with every other problem he faces.

October 24, 2009

by Deb Cupples | Tomorrow, at 7 pm EST, CBS's 60 Minutes will run a segment on Medicare fraud -- which does, in fact, cost our Medicare program billions of dollars each year. I saw the teaser (below), which briefly discusses one man's former habit of billing Medicare for goods or services that he never provided and never even had.

As I've written many times since 2007, it's not just fake companies that commit Medicare fraud. Many "legitimate" companies that have contracts with Medicare have also robbed Medicare (e.g., by double-billing, over-billing, and billing for goods or services that either weren't needed or weren't provided). For more than a dozen examples, see this post.

I'm glad that the Justice Department is (once again) cracking down. I just hope that the Department won't restrict itself to going after the little guys, while letting the big guys routinely get away with bilking us taxpayers out of billions.

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60
members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are
continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White
House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support
of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)."

Frankly, I'm not sure what the "opt out clause" is, but it doesn't sound good. Here's what Marc Ambinder says:

"The White House is denying reports that officials are pressuring Sen.
Harry Reid to scale back the scope of the 'public option' that'll be
attached to the Senate health insurance bill. Talking Points Memo reported,
based on unnamed sources close to the negotiations, that the White
House is 'skeptical' of a public option that includes a state opt-out
choice, preferring -- and advocating for -- a public option that would
kick in only if the private exchange failed to lower costs."

Why are our elected officials making this so complicated? The way I see it, it's pretty simple.

October 20, 2009

"A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a
government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has
rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from
the public."

"Rebounded"? The writer assumes that support for a public option really did drastically decline between June and July. A poll by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (released in July) indicates that "between 68 percent and 88 percent of Americans either strongly or
somewhat support health reform ideas such as national health plans, a
public plan option...."

October 13, 2009

by Deb Cupples | Every dollar that goes toward private-contractor waste, fraud or abuse (or profiteering) is one less dollar to pay for actual health-care goods and services. You can see more than a dozen real-world examples here. That said, the Justice Department announced a couple of relevant cases.

Last week, Harborside Health care and HHC Nutrition services agreed to pay the U.S. Government $1.375 million to settle allegations that the company received (illegal) kickbacks and help "under the guise of a durable medical equipment (DME) provider."

Also last week, a doctor, an office manager, and a Detroit clinic owner were indicted over an alleged $2.3 million Medicare fraud scheme.

Sure, a few million dollars seems like chump change in terms of health-care fraud, but it happens all the time and it adds up.

by Deb Cupples | When people truly have data on their side, they rarely waste time fudging data.

As my co-blogger Bartleby mentioned yesterday, a report released on Sunday questionably indicates that private health insurance premiums would go up if the federal government enacts a plan to gives us ordinary folks relief from skyrocketing health-insurance premiums.

Fact: despite a lack of a federal government intervention, from 2000 through 2007 the nation's top-10 insurance companies managed to raise our premiums enough that their profits went from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion (i.e., profits more than quadrupled).

Back to Sunday's report. Who paid for it? An insurance-industry group called America's Health Insurance Plans.

Who was paid to crunch and interpret the numbers? Big-4 accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers: a name that many people trust -- despite all those public-company annual reports, done by Pricewaterhouse, that had to later be "re-stated."

Even without reading the report, the inherent conflicts of interest should raise red flags for anyone who heard about the report's reform-unfriendly conclusions: 1) the insurance industry opposes a any reform that would reduce the number of our dollars flowing into industry coffers, and 2) Pricewaterhouse likely knew on which side of the health-care-reform debate its paying client wanted the report to fall.

But we don't need to rely on sensibly inspired red flags, because M.I.T. economist John Gruber quickly responded to the report by analyzing it, pointing out flaws, and refuting conclusions. The New York Times reports:

October 12, 2009

by bartleby the scrivener | Ha ha ha! So much for the industry's much-touted "collaboration." When will our Dems ever learn, eh? If you lie down with dogs, you get up with rabies. "[T]he insurance industry plans to strike out against the effort on Monday
with a report warning that the typical family premium in 2019 could
cost $4,000 more than projected." (WaPo)
Yep, and here's the big announcement. Apparently Congressional Dems didn't see that one coming. I wonder why not? As Josh Marshall says: this is news?